New Country: Húsavík, Iceland

I’m now (slightly) south of the Arctic Circle in Húsavík, Iceland. Current latitude is about N66 degrees 2 minutes. Sunrise was at 2:17 this morning and sunset will be after midnight. 

Húsavík is a beautiful town of about 2,500 people on the north shore in the eastern part of Iceland. On one side of the bay we’re anchored in is the town with nice green-covered hills. The other side of the bay has more rugged mountains with lots of snow (but apparently no glaciers) on them. 

We arrived about 8am and had fully explored the town — found both geocaches, visited the stave church (the tall white building with the steeple near the right of the town picture), walked to the Jaja Ding Dong cafe which appeared in the 2020 Netflix movie, saw the monument to the Apollo astronauts who trained here in the 1960s (picture below), and walked around a bit. Unlike Norway we did not notice ladders on the roofs near chimneys or anything on roofs to prevent snow from falling on unsuspecting people walking by. 

Some members of the group were ambitious enough to do a 6km (3.75 mile) walk up to 417 meters (1350+ feet) for a third cache but I declined. I also declined to visit the whale museum. 

We saw arctic terns, common terns, and lots of other birds. I’m ridiculously pleased with my picture of the arctic tern almost perfectly centered in a boat’s mast. 

The locals clearly have a good sense of humor with the “tinker toy” art work of birds. Next door to the Jaja Ding Dong cafe (which wasn’t open but had an expensive museum we declined to enter) was a small set of buildings perhaps a meter/yard tall built into the hillside:

They also are exceedingly practical with a roomba lawn mower parked at the church (the cache was not located there) which we first saw parked but later saw in action.

There were lots of flowers planted and cared for along the roads and in planters. And a couple of not especially tall conifers (pines?). My favorite of the presumably native plants was lupine:

A fine introduction to what promises to be a beautiful country, and one I will want to return to as there are many more interesting locations to explore that I won’t get to see this trip. This evening we sail to Akureyri which is southwest of here but we will need to head northwest as there’s a large peninsula between here and there.